THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 23, 2017
93
Hoover was the sort of wizard of logistical e ciency prized by the new era.
BOOKS
MANAGER-IN-CHIEF
Herbert Hoover and the making of modern America.
BY NICHOLAS LEMANN
ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN
Last year, the economist Robert Gor-
don published a book titled "The
Rise and Fall of American Growth,"
which set out to debunk the notion that
we live in a great age of innovation.The
celebrated inventions of the past half
century, like the personal computer and
the Internet, Gordon argues, have in-
creased productivity and transformed
people's lives far less than did the lead-
ing inventions of the half century be-
tween and , like household
electricity, indoor plumbing, and the
automobile. "Most aspects of life in
(except for the rich) were dark,
dangerous, and involved backbreaking
work," he wrote in a paper that appeared
a few years before the book. People's
homes were dark and poorly heated,
and smoky from candles and oil lamps.
"But the biggest inconvenience was the
lack of running water," Gordon noted.
"Every drop of water for laundry, cook-
ing, and indoor chamber pots had to
be hauled in by the housewife, and
wastewater hauled out."
It was into the lower end of such cir-
cumstances that Herbert Hoover, the
thirty-first President of the United States,
was born, in . Hoover was the son
of devout Quakers who lived in the fron-
tier village of West Branch, Iowa. His
father, a blacksmith, died when Herbert
was six, and his mother died three years
later. At the age of eleven, he was sent,
by train, along a just completed rail line,
to a small settlement in Oregon, to live
with an uncle, who treated him coldly
and loaded him down with chores. Quiet,
awkward, and a poor student, Hoover
somehow managed, by his young adult-
hood, to have made himself into an ex-
emplar of his generation's America, a
technologically advanced world power.
By early middle age, he was a cele-
brated international hero.The times de-
manded industrial-scale achievements,
not limited to industry itself; Hoover
was a public-service superman, a mega-
bureaucrat. In , the Kansas journal-
ist William Allen White---who became
one of Hoover's closest friends and his
leading publicist---proclaimed the dawn
of a new age: "Just as the same hundred
men or so are the directors of all our
big banks, of all our great railroads, and
of many of our public service corpora-
tions---directing the centripetal forces
of American society---so another group
of a hundred men, more or less, is found
directing many of the societies, associa-
tions, conventions, assemblies, and leagues
behind the benevolent movements---the
centrifugal forces of American society."
Within a few years, Hoover had placed
himself at the head of that second group.
Among the cruelties of popular po-
litical history is that almost everyone
below the level of President winds up
being forgotten, and one-term Presidents
are usually remembered as failures.
Nobody demonstrates this better than
Hoover. He was elected in with four
hundred and forty-four electoral votes,
carrying all but eight states---and it was
the first time he had run for political
o ce. Four years later, he got fifty-nine
electoral votes and carried just six states.
What intervened between his two Pres-
idential runs was the stock-market
crash and the early years of the Great
Depression. Hoover was doomed to be
remembered as the man who was too
rigidly conservative to react adeptly to
the Depression, as the hapless foil to the
great Franklin Roosevelt, and as the pol-
itician who managed to turn a Repub-
lican country into a Democratic one.
(The Democratic majority in the House
of Representatives that began during
Hoover's Presidency lasted for all but
four of the next sixty-two years.) Even
now, if you were a politician running for